With the impending launch of services like OnLive, Gaikai, and the new …

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Many non-gamers and casual gamers who've heard the cloud computing hype might be surprised to learn that the cloud is actually changing the way we play games. From the ever-evolving Steam and Impulse to upcoming services like OnLive, the cloud has already had a serious impact on the games industry, and with a slew of new services on tap for later this year and next, that impact is slated to grow enormously. This shift to the cloud has implications far beyond the gaming experience—every aspect of the multibillion dollar business of gaming will be affected, from distribution and sales to quality assurance to anti-piracy controls.

Steam releases the Cloud

The gaming world got its first major taste of cloud-based gaming on November 18, 2008. Alongside the release of the highly anticipated co-op zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead, developer Valve also rolled out a brand new service: Steam Cloud. This new service lets users store data such as saved games, multiplayer settings, and keyboard configurations on Valve's servers instead of locally on their own computer. What this meant for PC gamers was the ability to have the same gaming experience on multiple PCs. You could start right where you left off in a game even when on a different computer, and there was no need for constantly fussing about with gamepad or keyboard settings. Steam Cloud "just worked."

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications," Valve president Gabe Newell said when the service was initially announced. "This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games. Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."

This concept has been very well received by gamers—it was one of our favorite tech trends of 2008. In addition to Steam, cloud-based features have also been added to services like Stardock's Impulse platform, and, in all likelihood, the idea will become even more pervasive in the future.

"The concept of virtual storage is to let a player’s 'stuff' become ubiquitous—accessible from anywhere. This way, they don’t have to worry about a new machine losing their mods or saved games or other key data," Stardock CEO and president Brad Wardell told Ars. "I am pretty convinced that it is going to become the dominant way for games to deal with transient data. When implemented correctly—that is, store it locally in the event the user loses 'Net access or the service is down, and store it on the cloud when possible—you end up with a much better customer experience while decreasing the support costs for the developer."

Put away that gaming rig

One year after Valve popularized the concept of cloud gaming, a then-unknown start-up announced plans to take it in an entirely different direction. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference, a company called OnLive revealed a brand new service that would allow any TV, PC, or Mac access to "the world's highest performance Games On Demand service." All you need is access to a broadband Internet connection and, if you're using the service on a TV, you need what OnLive dubs the MicroConsole. The major benefit of OnLive for consumers is that, in theory, it allows players with modest hardware to access more demanding titles without having to upgrade—certainly a very appealing prospect.

OnLive has already garnered the support of a number of big-name publishers and developers, including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Take-Two. The service could very well be as beneficial to those who make games as to those who play them. According to Onlive founder and CEO Steve Perlman, one of the major benefits is the piracy protection that cloud gaming provides, a subject which is currently on the minds of many PC developers.

"You can't pirate a videogame and you can't have used games, so that solves the piracy problem," he explained during a talk at Columbia University. "A movie you can always pirate, you can point a camera at the TV set, or a microphone at the speakers. But if the game is running remotely in the cloud, and it's playing here, you can't pirate it. Because every experience is unique."

This is surely an attractive proposition for many publishers, who have struggled with finding ways to curb PC gaming piracy. However, for some developers, the anti-piracy features aren't what makes OnLive so attractive. Instead, it's more of a sense of curiosity about what this type of service could mean for the future gaming.

"The guys at OnLive made it really easy for us—we didn't have to do anything to our game, it just worked on their service," Ron Carmel, one half of World of Goo developer 2D Boy told Ars. 2D Boy is one of the few independent developers (if not the only one) that has partnered with OnLive. "We were also very curious to see how well the service works, and having a game on there and getting sales and usage data is the best view an outsider can get."

However, while World of Goo has infamously been subject to a great deal of piracy, Carmel says that piracy had no impact on the developer's decision to partner with OnLive. Instead, he pointed to a much different benefit, one that is especially poignant for smaller developers like 2D Boy who have limited resources.

"The most obvious one is beta testing," he told Ars. "As a developer you could beta test your game on a cloud computing solution without risking a leak, and knowing that all your testers are always using the latest version. Another huge advantage is that all of the game's inputs and outputs can be recorded, so when someone reports a bug or a crash happens, you can go back and see exactly what happened. Reproducing bugs is often the most difficult and time consuming part of fixing them, and being able to replay a bug would significantly speed up the bug fixing process that dominates the end of every game's development cycle."

Of course the major question is, does OnLive actually work. The prospect certainly shows quite a bit of promise, but is the technology there yet? While we won't know for certain until it actually launches on June 17, early reports from beta testers suggest that there are a number of technological hurdles that OnLive hasn't been able to overcome, with at least one person who got unauthorized access to the beta test claiming that the lag and graphical issues rendered games "simply unplayable." (In its defense, OnLive counters that this person was way too far away from the servers, and that the service will be targeted at specific geographies to combat this problem.) The service has also been criticized for its pricing structure. OnLive will cost users a $14.95 monthly fee, in addition to the costs of purchasing and renting games.

Similar to OnLive is L.A.-based OTOY, which makes use of AMD's Fusion Render Cloud GPU/CPU server platform. Combined with OTOY's own cloud streaming tech, the service wants to deliver an OnLive-style experience, albeit on any Internet-capable device. "These [AMD Fusion Render Cloud] servers will permit content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet 'cloud' to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser in a manner designed to help maximize battery life and to efficiently process the content," the company claims.

To demonstrate this, the company showed off a version of Crysis—a visually intense first person shooter often deemed the benchmark for high-end computer graphics—running on an iPhone. And, aside from the obvious control issues, it worked.

In fact, Ars Deputy Editor Jon Stokes came away from the demo much more impressed by the games streaming on the iPhone than those on a larger monitor. Games like BioShock and World of Warcraft showed plenty of compression artifacts on full-sized monitors, so much so that in-game text was almost unreadable. However, when viewed on the smaller screen of an iPhone, these graphical issues weren't as apparent.

This could potentially make OTOY very appealing to more casual, less discerning gamers, though the graphical and lag issues will probably turn off the more hardcore. The service is expected to make its public debut in Q2 2010.

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72 Reader Comments

We are still very far away from this kind of stuff catching on. You need a fast and very stable connection, plus how far you are from the nearest server will be a huge deal. I feel this is almost like a step backward. Who wants laggier games and more compressed graphics? Oh yeah and it won't work if your internet goes out. Sounds horrible!

While I'm not necessary in support of the whole cloud based gaming idea...

Isn't this basically the entire way that MMORPG's have worked for years? You have some of the assets on your computer but it relies on cloud based servers to dictate where you are, what you're doing, and what the end result of your actions are (i.e. what loot shows up on your kills).

So its not exactly all that revolutionary if you look at it from that perspective.

I still don't get how cloud based gaming would work. This post (and generally from what I have read) seems to suggest that all the number crunching would be done on the server side so that games with higher requirements could be played on low-end systems. How would this work?

What's the point of running a game at high quality settings if the compression is going to screw the quality. The necessity of the low latency compression code of OnLive results in an ugly compressed image at low resolution (1280x720 max). Increased bandwidth cannot fix the compression quality; tweaks to the algorithm can only make minor improvements. Input latency would be high and variable. Many console gamers are used to this already with some modern games (GTAIV) but it would be intolerable to many in most games. For me, immediate response to my inputs is part of what makes games so immersive. The upfront cost will make it prohibitive to new customers and old customers will miss the pristine quality of the graphics even on low settings. The benefit is three-fold: less headache PC gaming for those constantly running into issues, being able to stream a zero latency real-time video of your game to friends and fans, and if a developer took the chance they could create a highly optimized game that can do some interesting networking mechanics not possible on other platforms.

As for the Steam solution, I love it. It doesn't require a constant internet connection like Ubisoft's and EA's recent DRM. I just wish more devs took advantage of the online storage feature. I guess we have the splintering of online distribution platforms to thank for that. They should work together to create some standardized code to work across Steam, Impluse, etc. Developer support would increase significantly.

InstantAction and Onlive aren't the only services of their kind. They're just the most widely known at this point. Take a look at http://awomo.com/ .

While services like Steam Cloud have shown us the potential for cloud-based gaming

Storing mods, control configs can be done today with any online storage service, or just email if the files you want saved are small enough. What Valve and Stardock provide simply integrates and automates this. It isn't a new ability/service being provided to gamers. Streaming games are.

Valve and Stardock may be using the marketing-driven term 'cloud', but what they provide is not cloud-based gaming. I would expect Ars to be a little more critical instead of just parroting whatever marketing fluff is disseminated to you.

Between the predictions of cloud-based gaming to the declarations that Blu-Ray will be the last of the archaic physical media formats, has anyone else detected a battle royale brewing between content providers and American ISPs? In the first corner we have have Big Media staking it's future on the American public having an always-on, fail-safe Internet connection to provide both content delivery with iron-clad DRM. In the second corner we have Big American ISPs determined to provide as minimal an Internet connection as possible to the masses for the largest profit margin possible.

Then you have ghastly corporate hybrid behemoths like AOLTimeWarner and the future ComcastNBCUniversal who will screw the American public at both ends.

You only need ~1mbps to watch YouTube and Hulu, so why do we need 3mbps DSL and 10mbps Cable, not to mention Verizon FIOS and other high-end Internet services? It's pretty much BitTorrent. Linux is so popular these days... not to mention pirated movies and TV shows. Obviously, the biggest use of super-fast broadband is piracy. But the Internet is growing, too, and super-fast Internet needs to legitimatize. Streaming video is one way. Streaming gaming is another.

Obviously, services such as what OnLive and others like them are proposing will only work in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Denver, Houston, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City... you get the drift. If you don't live in a major metropolitan area, you won't be getting OnLive. If you can't get Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint cell phone service at your home (like me), you won't be getting this for a while. (Where do I live? ZIP code 27817 -- Google Maps it.) No, but the demands will push the broadband infrastructure to support it, which is what Obama and Google and of course OnLive and Netflix want: super-fast Internet everywhere. (Nothing wrong with that, this is certainly the best way to go about it.)

Another point, what of eliminating piracy and secondhand sales? Firstly, piracy was said to drive up costs. Secondly, secondhand sales don't give the developers or publisher any money, but they sure help us in terms of lower prices. Not to mention the lack of a need to ship these games, package them, etc. So if we're to give these up, should games become significantly cheaper? Probably not, but some interesting opportunities should present themselves. For example, for those who pay attention, a random selection from last year's games could be given away for free one day. You'd just be browsing, and hey, to use an example, looks like Bioshock is free today. Not free to license perpetually, mind you, just to play. So you click on it, choose it however, you're playing Bioshock, at no cost to you. But then the day ends, you can't access it anymore, but your save remains. Should you choose to purchase the game, you can pick up from where you left off. They could do this often, it wouldn't cost them a dime (more) and it would probably increase sales.

Bottom line, like any drastic changes, the potential for problems will always be there, but the potential for good is likely greater.

While in my opinion services such as those offered by Steam and by Impulse are fantastic and have my complete support as they assist my gaming, I have absolutely zero interest in any of these other *cloud services*.

The requirement to always have to be online is not what I call a feature. Here in Australia we pay a lot of money for average internet (low speeds and low download caps), and that is assuming that the internet is always working at an acceptable speed (we frequently seem to get slowed service to overseas locations from where I live, which is a major metropolitan area).

The best part of Steam Cloud is that when it doesn't work I can still play my games, I just may have to manually change my settings.

As Ubisoft has recently demonstrated, when its DRM servers go down... so long and thanks for all the fish!

"The concept of virtual storage is to let a player’s 'stuff' become ubiquitous—accessible from anywhere....."

Yeah, and to ensure they have full control over your access so when they start charging you on a per minute basis to play in the future and you don't pay they shut you down despite having already purchased the game. I tend to think this is not about piracy at all. The more control they have over what you store, the more control they have over what you pay. Not just Valve, but all of them. This costs money for them to do, do you think they are so nice as to continue to provide it for free forever? At some point the bottom line business will kick in and it has to be paid for some way, and what better way to do that then charging those that play everytime they play.

Personally as someone who's computer is getting a bit old now, only two years, too play the newest release games (and for that reason moved to Xbox 360 for most gaming), cloud based gaming looks really attractive, the ability to play a new release game in ultra high quality without fufhing around with settings and configurations and expensive hardware, a dream come true.

I'm willing to put up with the DRM like online only mode for the benefits for not having to upgrade my PC (current online only games like AC2 on the PC give no benefit over a normal version to people who purchase the game)

Lets see Piracy will happen regardless of what age man finds himself in, bootleging(the proper term IMO) will happen due to popularity/interest and/or profit and little else. I wish copy right would update itself to the times so that it focuses more on illicit profit(which is easier to police in any shape or form) and less on copies/distribution(which is impossible to control all forms of it).

Anyway MMOs have been hacked to death and back so they are not that much more safe they just have a more steady profit margin least till people start fleeing from the degrading nightmare or interest dose not get high enough to maintain it.......

Anyway where was I... oh yes...onlive....its about 10 years to early to go nation wide so I doubt it will make it to a point where anyone with 6.0mb or better connections can make any use of it.

Steam has a great flaw that they have yet to address a proper offline mode, it should automatically run offline compatible content online or offline........ unless you switch it over while its online it dose not always let you switch over....

The cheapest and easiest way to get the product to people is the consoles and their ability as a online/offline media and game player, the WII is doing well because its cheap and has brand power the 360 is doing well because of its wide user base the PS3 is doing well due to brand power and free net.

DRM is the suits mentality of filling a need that dose not exist so meh they will figure it out that their precious DRM is broken before most products hit the store shelf's... so they should concerning themselves with non consumers,focus on the consumer and the almost consumer before you run out of consumers...............

Screw this. MMOs need internet connection for providing the MMO experience. SP games do not need it and there is no freaking way I'm going to lease software. I'm either buying it or not. Their choice. I have plenty of other things to spend my money on if gaming companies don't want that money.

Of course the major question is, does OnLive actually work. The prospect certainly shows quite a bit of promise, but is the technology there yet?

I think the question is more: Will the technology EVER be there. And why should we care? Hell Steam is great, not needing to backup your data, have DVDs lying around etc. must be one of the greatest things and fast (read high-bandwidth) internet connections make this very usable.

Now why should we care to have a Gaming thin-client? PCs are much faster than the current gaming consoles, 3D APIs have become very stable and a nice graphic card costs as much as a good meal. So why in gods name should I do the computing somewhere on the cloud with all its lag and internet connection problems? This whole thin client thing will fail this time as it did the last 5 times. Internet connections improve but the computers on your desktop do as well. So if you want to virtualize somewhere why not on the PC below your desk.

Cloud gaming isn't a horrible idea, but it's like any other form of digital media. You're paying in hopes of that servers are never shut down. In this world, it wouldn't be at all shocking if even a big company like Steam went out of business. If so, all those games you thought you owned are gone. Cloud gaming is on the same boat. Physical always beats digital for this reason alone.

Plus, there are still people that play their older bought games. I recently went through Outlaws (LucasArts) again and enjoyed it. It's like watching an old movie.

You LIKED the Steam Cloud? For running a team server it was a huge pain to setup. Half the reason I setup my own server was because the servers in the "cloud" always seemed to be crap. Cloud gaming is a fad. I can't see practically doing any further than the Steam Cloud for no other reason than locality and what to do when the Interwebz go down (think Star Craft II). When you're at that fun LAN party and the uplink goes down, what do you do? With Cloud gaming, looks like you're breaking out the boardgames...

Someday, when 100-gigabit Internet access is getting old and the Next Big Thing is about to hit, I'll probably be playing something like this. Assuming my old gaming systems are gone and weren't replaced due to cloud cover.

Boy, the bad BAD puns over this cloud computing stuff just keep popping up. I kinda wish I felt it was a good thing rather than just the Next Big Thing. My own CPU cranking as fast as possible just for me is still really comforting...

If you feel like playing you can. Giving up your rights for no good reason is just plain stupid.

No, what is stupid is people spouting crap like this that makes it sound like some conspiracy to enslave the people. I would bet that almost no one reading this is currently playing 99% of the games they have "owned" over the years. I would also bet that almost no one plays any game that they own for longer than a year unless that game is constantly updated ( a la MMORPGs which of course carry a cost). In fact, virtually all games are played less than what, 20 hours? A hundred hours at most (again, MMOs aside). But let us pretend that steam goes tits up. Chances are you've already played all the games you have with them to death, other than the one or two you have just recently purchased. So what? You can't play them anymore. You weren't going to play them anymore anyway. So fine, enjoy your meaningless rights by not buying games from services like Steam. But don't pretend you're some noble defender of liberty.

Here's another angle... "Why have broadband?" or... "Why have really fast broadband?" You only need ~1mbps to watch YouTube and Hulu, so why do we need 3mbps DSL and 10mbps Cable, not to mention Verizon FIOS and other high-end Internet services? It's pretty much BitTorrent.

or, you know, being able to download stuff from Steam at a reasonable speed, or watch Hulu/Netflix at something better than Youtube-grade shitty minimum quality with heavy compression artifacting, or you live with someone else and want to actually be able to use the internet while your roommate watches Hulu at minimum quality, or a whole bunch of other things that aren't piracy.

Why does GaiKai think they can charge publishers for games when usually it's the other way around?

Good luck OnLive getting those cable and console deals mentioned in the last paragraph. Cable might do it because it's a value-add for their service. More likely is they'd just buy OnLive if they're impressed with what they see. Now it's high-risk-high-reward because OnLive doesn't have a product yet. If OnLive becomes successful, it's less risk but more expensive to buy the company. The console makers will never write a deal with OnLive. Console makers want you to buy a console. They don't want you to buy an OnLive. Through the power of technology, it might be possible to make this happen. You'd need several OnLive branded controllers, I think.

OnLive still needs to improve their offering. Initial previews were mixed.

Under current copy right law that is just what you are doing,leasing not owning.

+Griz wrote:

DarkReality wrote:

Here's another angle... "Why have broadband?" or... "Why have really fast broadband?" You only need ~1mbps to watch YouTube and Hulu, so why do we need 3mbps DSL and 10mbps Cable, not to mention Verizon FIOS and other high-end Internet services? It's pretty much BitTorrent.

or, you know, being able to download stuff from Steam at a reasonable speed, or watch Hulu/Netflix at something better than Youtube-grade shitty minimum quality with heavy compression artifacting, or you live with someone else and want to actually be able to use the internet while your roommate watches Hulu at minimum quality, or a whole bunch of other things that aren't piracy.

Why does GaiKai think they can charge publishers for games when usually it's the other way around?

Good luck OnLive getting those cable and console deals mentioned in the last paragraph. Cable might do it because it's a value-add for their service. More likely is they'd just buy OnLive if they're impressed with what they see. Now it's high-risk-high-reward because OnLive doesn't have a product yet. If OnLive becomes successful, it's less risk but more expensive to buy the company. The console makers will never write a deal with OnLive. Console makers want you to buy a console. They don't want you to buy an OnLive. Through the power of technology, it might be possible to make this happen. You'd need several OnLive branded controllers, I think.

OnLive still needs to improve their offering. Initial previews were mixed.

Onlive is flawed but with the right setup you might could do well with it, start off by offering all services to the PC as well with the PC aiding to the cloud network while its active you can score points if you just leave it on after a couple months you can get a single use 25% off code. The service starts with basic SD qaulity for anything but a 10mb+ connection, this service level is 8$ a month games start at 5$ and stop at 25$. The HD level starts at 19 a month games are 10-50$ and you get 10% off that for buying into the HD service.

They really need to do alacart plans tho, pay 20$ a month you rent up to 5 games(twice that of films) in a 60 day period to change a game thats 5$ a shot, for 40$ you get 12(twice that of films) and its 5$ to change it past that, for 99$ a month you get to chose anything they have to offer.

But the way games are licensed,ect I do not think its possible for any service to do that with new games..... but then again wait 6 months before its on onlive..... perhaps have it so you can get it before the onlive release date for 20$.... it could work.......

If you feel like playing you can. Giving up your rights for no good reason is just plain stupid.

No, what is stupid is people spouting crap like this that makes it sound like some conspiracy to enslave the people. I would bet that almost no one reading this is currently playing 99% of the games they have "owned" over the years. I would also bet that almost no one plays any game that they own for longer than a year unless that game is constantly updated ( a la MMORPGs which of course carry a cost). In fact, virtually all games are played less than what, 20 hours? A hundred hours at most (again, MMOs aside). But let us pretend that steam goes tits up. Chances are you've already played all the games you have with them to death, other than the one or two you have just recently purchased. So what? You can't play them anymore. You weren't going to play them anymore anyway. So fine, enjoy your meaningless rights by not buying games from services like Steam. But don't pretend you're some noble defender of liberty.

That's pretty funny given that before you wrote this, I posted how I just played a game from 1997, an old FPS with the mixing of 2D and some 3D. Some people play classic games like some people watch classic movies. The problem is, ultimately, I should still be able to KEEP my stuff. Plus, if my brother wants to play, I can loan it to him when I'm done.

have you tried pirating tv shows on a 1Mbit line? you can either start a torrent and spend more time downloading it than watching it, or you can put on Hulu, let it buffer for a minute, and then watch it.

I don't even know why people are proposing services like this when the state of American broadband is still goddamn terrible. my last place only had 1Mbit DSL from the worst ISP ever (Frontier), then I moved and now it's either 3Mbit Frontier DSL, or Time Warner which is supposed to be 10Mbit but seems to drop to 3-4 at primetime.

have you tried pirating tv shows on a 1Mbit line? you can either start a torrent and spend more time downloading it than watching it, or you can put on Hulu, let it buffer for a minute, and then watch it.

I don't even know why people are proposing services like this when the state of American broadband is still goddamn terrible. my last place only had 1Mbit DSL from the worst ISP ever (Frontier), then I moved and now it's either 3Mbit Frontier DSL, or Time Warner which is supposed to be 10Mbit but seems to drop to 3-4 at primetime.

Somethings hulu is good for but others not so much, like anime and dr who

Onlive is 10 years ahead of time but so was DVD, it finally took off in the 90s when it was around since 82ish, or was that the CD....mmmmm damn I am getting old ><

One of the main reasons I still prefer PC over console games when available is the ability to monkey around and change setting on the game, either via mods or hacks to remove gameplay I don't want to deal with. I just don't see how these services will allow you to hack your Mass Effect 2 save game where I don't have to do the mining minigame, or say install a user created level for Half-Life. I also have the sinking suspicion that paid DLC will become ubiquitous allowing for developers to nickle and dime consumers.

Between the predictions of cloud-based gaming to the declarations that Blu-Ray will be the last of the archaic physical media formats, has anyone else detected a battle royale brewing between content providers and American ISPs? In the first corner we have have Big Media staking it's future on the American public having an always-on, fail-safe Internet connection to provide both content delivery with iron-clad DRM. In the second corner we have Big American ISPs determined to provide as minimal an Internet connection as possible to the masses for the largest profit margin possible.

Then you have ghastly corporate hybrid behemoths like AOLTimeWarner and the future ComcastNBCUniversal who will screw the American public at both ends.

Someone pass the popcorn!

This is exactly why this will never work. Add to this taking away ownership of a product from consumers, the inability to provide the service to the major of the nation, and a lower quality experience (compression, lag, etc); you just created a recipe for epic failure to launch.

Why can't I download a Game Demo for my 360 then pay to download each successive level incrementally as I make progress through the game? That way if I get bored with it, or stuck, I'm not paying for a load of content that I don't use. I try out more games and end up paying for more parts of games that I would never risk paying for in their entirety up-front. Give me Dead or Alive with two characters and one environment, or Forza with one track and one car, or a single Battlefield Bad Company 2 multiplayer map with no way to get it to let me rank up until I pay for the privilege (even though I am playing against real paying ranked players)

Surely this would encourage publishers investing in more experimental content - as they would only need to fund the development of a game engine (or pay to use Unreal/CryEngine) and make the art/sound assets for the demo and the first pay-to-download episode/map-pack/weapon/car/horse-armour.

I hope by the time the Xbox 1080 comes out I no longer need to Eject and swap removable disc media.